This is a post to highlight a recent podcast appearance I made on The Growth Hub podcast with Seija Lappalainen and Reeta Westman, who are both based out of Finland, and with whom I had a lot of fun talking. So much fun, in fact, that we ran long and they ended up splitting the episode in two parts: one focused on founder sales knowledge (material derived from the Balderton Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales that I wrote and about which I’ve blogged here) and the other focused on sales & marketing alignment.
In the podcast episode we address questions including:
- Which role I most preferred in my career (e.g., CMO vs. CEO vs. NXD)?
- What are my duties in my role as an EIR at Balderton Capital?
- Why we decided to write the Founder’s Guide to B2B Sales?
- What are key things founders need to know about sales?
- The Andromeda Strain problem — what explains what chief architects and top salespeople have in common?
- What is the most common thing that product-founders get wrong in approaching sales?
- Why I think a popcorn machine is a better analog than a funnel when it comes to sales?
- How do founders become good salespeople?
- How can marketers best learn about sales?
- How much has technology changed sales and how important are technology skills?
- Why am I such a massive fan of conversation intelligence tools, such as Gong or Chorus?
- What should founders know about marketing?
- Why I think marketing is in part responsible for the confusion surrounding marketing?
- How to better align sales & marketing (and why unfortunately it’s still worth talking about)?
- How to resolve alignment conflicts between the CEO, CRO, and CMO?
- Why marketers should be broad in skills, tools, and knowledge to help avoid the Maslow’s hammer problem?
- What are my views on titles (and associated structures) such as chief growth officer, growth marketing, and performance marketing?
- How to grow sales & marketing together, which touches on the pipeline chicken/egg problem and the inverted funnel model?
I’ve embedded a video version of the episode below.
The podcast is available on Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify, the web, and YouTube.
I hope you enjoy it and thanks again to Seija and Reeta for having me.